Owners of animals such as pets and livestock alike face problems caused by animal excrement; its foul odor and the need to eliminate it. Human excrement, such as in out houses in camp sites and army camps, pose the same problems. National and international regulations require that materials used for treating excrement, be non toxic and friendly to the environment, in particular that they do not contribute to adding nitrates or phosphates to the water reservoir. Additional requirements of commercial deodorizing compositions are low cost, simplicity of use in and outdoors and efficient deodorizing of excrement in liquid and solid forms.
The principle targets of most existing treatment methods for preventing offensive odors of animal excrement, are ammonia and indolic amines. The common method to prevent offensive odors and retard bacterial and enzymatic decomposition is converting these compounds to their much less volatile ammonium salts by various organic and inorganic acids or their salts, as described in numerous publications.
Although acidification prevents offensive odors originating from basic ammonia and amines, it intensifies the offensive odors due to the excrement's volatile organic acids such as acetic, propionic and butyric acids, due to the stabilization of their non ionized form. Furthermore, feces of low mobility do not come into contact with the deodorizing agents which are usually absorbed or sprayed on pet's litter and hence are only partially deodorized.
Therefore, there is a need for an inexpensive, effective and environment friendly composition which will include an impermeable barrier to excrement offensive odors in addition to safe deodorizing treatment of ammonia and indolic amines.
This impermeable barrier has an additional advantage of slowing down the air oxidative and enzymatic nitrification of the excrement ammonia and organic nitrogen, leading to dispersion and attenuation of nitrate concentrations in the environment.
Of the known deodorizing formulations for pet and livestock few, if any, are of practical use.
Use is made of cross-linked polymer gels, as water absorbing materials, in compositions for treatment of pet excrement, in several patents.
Japanese patents 5269164, 3290126 and 2238834 disclose polymer gels with high water absorbing capacity for absorbing animal excretions. These gels may previously be blended with deodorant agents.
Japanese patent 63185323 discloses absorbents for deodorizing pet excrement's. Polyvinyl alcohol is used as a binder in the production of pellets comprised of water absorbing inorganic polymers, like zeolites, and water soluble inorganic salts.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,039,481 describes NH3 scavenging deodorant made of aliphatic polycarboxylic acids for treatment of livestock excrement.
Japanese patents 61119127 and 62153348 describe compositions for treating pet feces with a water insoluble coating to reduce odors and to enable feces to be removed by hand. These compositions, however, comprise toxic and ecologically unsafe volatile organic solvents such as acetone, methylene chloride, benzene, CFCl3 and the expensive and toxic cyanoacrylate monomer.
The present invention describes novel deodorizing compositions comprising organic acids and water soluble polymers for excrement coating, which meet the above mentioned requirements. Furthermore, the present invention overcomes the two above mentioned major limitations of offensive odor due to stabilizing the non ionized form of excrement's volatile organic acids and low mobility feces not coming in full contact with the deodorizing composition, by incorporating water soluble barrier forming agents in the deodorant composition.